April in Spain is something of a hybrid novel. Under the pen name of Benjamin Black, John Banville has authored a popular crime fiction series set in Dublin and featuring the heavy-drinking pathologist Dr Quinn. As John Banville, he writes fiction with a more literary dimension with complex and contemplative narratives often about loss and obsession.
He’s brought these two aspects of his writing personalities together and also resurrected two characters from previous novels who combine forces to help solve a mystery in 1950s Northern Spain. Pride of place is given to Dr Quinn but there’s also an appearance by St John Strafford, an Irish detective who made his first appearance in Snow.
April in Spain opens with Quirke on holiday in the Basque city of San Sebastien with his new wife. He’s not enjoying the experience. While his wife embraces the sunshine, local delicacies and culture, Quirke finds it difficult to relax. He’s cut down on his drinking
At a restaurant one night, he encounters a hospital who bears a strong resemblance to a girl called April Latimer who was once his daughter’s friend. Quirke becomes more and more convinced that the doctor and April Latimer are one and the same person. Yet how can that be when April disappeared from Dublin in the wake of a family scandal five years ago? She’s been presumed dead though her body has never been found..
Quirke calls his daughter Phoebe, who informs the Latimers and also Quirke’s boss. Soon various people are on their way to San Sebastien, some like St John Strafford who have a genuine interest in protecting the woman and others, like the paid assassin Terry Tice who want her silenced.
The plot was actually of secondary interest to me. I thought it was workmanlike but not particularly engaging and the mystery was too easy to guess. The real strength of the novel lay in the atmosphere and even more significantly, in the characters.
I love how Banville captures the essence of his people in a few carefully selected sentences. Strafford, we’re told, has a face “so narrow it seemed that if he turned sideways it would collapse into two dimensions and become a fine, straight line. “ A senior civil servant in the Irish government “resembled some big-shouldered forest-dwelling creature … one of those apes with over hangingbrows and a patch of white fur on their chests, that swing themselves on their knuckles along the jungle floor.” The bar man in a Dublin pub has “the look of a walrus, with fat shoulders and a sloped back and a tired moustache drooping at the tips”.
I’d “already met” Detective Inspector St John Strafford when I read Snow so I knew him to be something of a solitary figure, out of synch with most of his countrymen. because he’s a Protestant in a largely Catholic police force and doesn’t drink alcohol. He also has family connections with “old money.” In April in Snow we learn a little more of this man, particularly his failing marriage. I’m wondering whether we’re going to see him become a more prominent figure in subsequent novels.
The pathologist Quirke was a completely new encounter however since I’ve not read any of the Benjamin Black novels but what I experienced in April in Spain I enjoyed. Quirke is such a morose and grumpy guy, uncomfortable in the heat of Spain and hating the very experience of being on holidays. He doesn’t like hotels: too many obsequious staff, and the horrifying thought of all those “greasy holidaymakers, leaky honeymooners, ..oldsters with leaky bladders” who’d already slept in the bed he was now occupying.
Nor does he think much of the food. He views the skewered snacks called pinixos as just a slightly fancier version of a sandwich and anyway “local specialities … were very rarely special.”He does make an exception for the local fizzy white wine, though, even to the point of learning how to pronounce it correctly. Maybe he thinks it doesn’t count as alcohol and so doesn’t break his promise to his wife to cut down on his drinking? A cliched view of the foreigner on holiday maybe but it’s deliciously funny nevertheless.
Forget the plot of this novel. it’s worth reading just for the scenes featuring Quirke and for it’s evocation of Spain at a time when tourism was on the rise but the era of lager louts and hen parties had yet to begin.
We're all friends here. Come and join the conversation